For non-gun owners: What would you fight to keep as much as guns are fought for in America?

In My Humble Opinion
1

The US Government has decided to ban a specific consumer product, service, activity, or other thing which fits your answer. :slight_smile: You are outraged, to the point where you’re like “I finally understand how the pro-gun people felt”.

Conditions:

  1. No taking away from your lower-level Maslow hierarchy items- food, housing, etc. You should be able to easily survive without this item.
  2. Products, services, activities, etc, are all included. People, pets, are not available for kidnapping - so no “my daughter” answers: your kids are safe.
  3. I am trying to be a bit serious here. Go ahead and snark, but I am genuinely interested in this.
  4. We’ll assume the rest of the amendments are safe. No need to include the 1st, or 5th, or 19th, or whatever.

I would be quite upset if pet ownership were banned. Don’t know if I would smuggle dogs, but yeah, that’s march on the White House level shit.

2

Maybe cars? Not that I love them, but they are practically prerequisites for being a participant in normal adult life in much of the US.

3

In Canada, socialized health care.

4

Nothing.

5

Personal cars. Even if public transportation existed near me (and for all I know it does), I love the freedom a car gives me to go where I want, when I want. I’ve been on busses/subways in the distant past and never want to relive those experiences.

6

I am a gun owner, and would like more restrictions.

Anyway. Yeah, cars. I would be screwed. Would have to sell my house. Or for that matter, 4x4 or AWD vehicles.

7

The first amendment to the Constitution

8

Assuming internet access is established as an unalienable right, the ability to own and drive my own privately owned vehicle. Especially something that is high performance oriented. I use public transit to get to work, and I’m fine with that. But I gotta have my car for everything else.

9

What did the OP just say?! :mad:
:wink:

10

medicare

universal K-12 education that is free to the end user

11

Well this kind of fouls the pool.

I immediately thought of this when I read the thread title.

That aside, if the government went round confiscating pets I’d probably lead the government overthrow singlehandedly.

12

At first I couldn’t think of anything either, but then the right to keep animals was mentioned, so yeah, that.

13

Cars was the first thing I thought of, but what about electronic communication? No more cell phones, no more email, no more internet, nothing. I think that would get people riled up. If it were proposed that all forms of electronic communication, including what is commonly referred to as ‘the internet’ were to be banned, I think even people that voted against net neutrality would have an issue with it.

14

Abortion rights, for sure. And consent rights, like the laws making marital rape a crime and laws against sexual harassment in the workplace.

The right to self-determination in health care, the most perennially threatened of which is the right to say no to psychiatric intervention but essentially that same right in all health care matters.

First amendment rights to affiliation and assembly, speech that includes the expression of unpopular beliefs and includes the right to decline to express a specified sentiment.

15

I am an American gun owner, but trying to answer the question, I would put attempts to ban/restrict/nudge ownership of privately owned and controlled, internal combustion automobiles up there with a ban on firearms possession. Don’t laugh, it’s coming. IMHO, a not far-fetched consequence of a comprehensive Green New Deal would be to ration carbon use sufficiently rigorously, so as to de facto mandate mass transit for most people.

Eliminating private pet ownership would really piss me off too.

16

Banning cars is coming in the next couple decades, I’m sure, and as long as they’re replaced properly (by fully electric self driving cars) I have no issue with it.

Pet ownership is a good one, but it shows the ridiculous levels we have to sink to for a comparison. Dogs killed 27 people in the United States in 2017. Compare that to 40,000 people killed by guns.

17

Voting rights.

If people can vote, they have an opportunity to protect everything else. If they lose the ability to vote, they will end up losing everything else.

And I know the OP said not to suggest anything that is covered by the Constitution. But despite the 15th, 19th, 24th, and 26th Amendments, there is a serious attempt going on to disenfranchise people.

18

In the UK, the NHS and the BBC, indeed the whole public service ethos. They are what define us.

19

Colleges and universities. OK, I work at one, so that might fall afoul of condition #1, but if the US government started shutting down any of them I’d be outraged regardless of whether I worked there or not.

20

If, with the success of the Impossible Burger, the government decided in a fit of anti-speciesism to ban the eating and sale of meat, I’d be up for a revolution.

Course, I’ve been up for a revolution since the whole Citizens United thing, so I don’t know what good that would do.